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Changing Minds in Senegal to Protect Girls From Genital Cutting
Key Excerpts from Article on Website of PBS


PBS, May 9, 2013
Posted: October 13th, 2014
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/rundown/molly-melching/

Molly Melching didnt think she had much more than curiosity and a love of the French language when she ventured off soon after college for Senegal. It turns out that this product of a conservative Midwestern Lutheran upbringing may have brought exactly the qualities and experiences needed to help engineer one of the most sweeping shifts in social norms and behavior in history. Her organization, Tostan, has helped 6,400 (and counting) communities in Senegal and seven other African nations abandon the practice of female genital mutilation, one that about 3 million girls endure each year and one that governments, aid agencies and missionaries have tried to end for centuries. Melchings story from Danville to Dakar is chronicled in a book to be released April 30: However Long the Night: Molly Melchings Journey to Help Millions of African Women and Girls Triumph. When she began what would become Tostan, which means breakthrough ... her goal was simply to provide basic health information, things like germ transmission and infection. She had no intention of broaching the sensitive and extremely taboo subject of genital cutting. That cause was championed by her Senegalese colleagues and friends, newly armed with health information and driven in at least one compelling case a cutter named Oureye by her own guilt. The message is we know you love your daughters and would never want to harm them, she says. People cannot be shamed into behavior modification, Melching insists. They need good scientific information to make their own decisions. Its a simple powerful lesson that applies to just about any development endeavor, one she hopes the book will help spread widely.

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